A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup offering fun music apps without any AI prompting — SkimNews
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- A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya raised a $5.5M pre-seed round from Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, and Systemic Ventures, with former Spotify chief content and advertising officer Dawn Ostroff joining as an advisor.
- Founder Máuhan M Zonoozy, who left his role as Spotify's head of innovation in 2024, previously built video clipping startup Bubbl, which Cricket Media acquired.
- The startup releases music interaction tools as 'singles' in an ongoing 'album,' including Speed Surfer (a Chrome extension that alters browser audio), Usersound (audio usernames), Stacks (a stem mixer on a 3×3 grid), Drops (a marble-deflecting pattern game), and Sampler (a YouTube-to-sampler converter).
- The flagship product bop, an iOS app, lets users place instruments and effects on a grid to remix a base song, adjust tempo, and export mixes directly to TikTok or Instagram — with a multiplayer version in development.
- Zonoozy said the company deliberately avoids infusing AI into its apps' user-facing features, arguing that if AI makes music more abundant, 'taste and human perspective and interaction and participation' become more valuable.
- This year, the company plans to release a 'musical sandbox mixer' that lets users build and customize their own instruments.
Why it matters: Zonoozy's bet cuts against the wave of AI music generation startups by prioritizing hands-on remixing over automated creation, and his $5.5M pre-seed from Spotify-connected investors gives him runway to test that thesis. The TikTok and Instagram export pipeline embedded in the flagship bop app targets the exact platform where Gen Z already remixes culture, positioning the company to capture participatory music behavior rather than passive streaming.
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